Fourth Quarterly Issue. January – March, 2018. P 52-60
Research Archive of Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (RAIITH)
Siva Shankar Kimidi, Mallikarjuna C and Saket Asthana
Abstract
The paper shares the experience related to the development of Institutional Repository (IR) Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad anmed RAIITH) using Open Source software (Eprints).
Authors consider that IR needs to be an essential component in any modern higher education and research institution in the present networked society. The benefits of IRs for the scientist/
academician and the research institution like greater citation, speedy dissemination and receipt of feed back, coverage of different versions of the research report, ensuring preservation, ease of access and use, self-submission facility, permanent place/ point of access/URL, showcasing of the intellectual achievements of the institution etc are highlighted. The suggestions put forward will be helpful to those intending to establish similar repositories.
Keywords: Institutional Repository (IR), IIT, Hyderabad, Eprints, RAIITH, digital Library, Research.
Introduction
The process of information transfer used to be very lengthy and time taking process. It was earlier very difficult to access the required information from the information generation centres or the traditional libraries.
The main reasons behind this are the access restrictions and other barriers existing between the libraries and the users. However, Information and Communication technology changed the scenario by breaking the access barriers and laid the path for digital revolution where the information storage, transfer and retrieval are made very easy for information transfer. Recall time for information retrieval in digital systems has come down as compared to the traditional libraries. To ser ve the societal goals,
institutions have to accommodate current technologies to overcome the knowledge gap in the society by creating, collecting, storing, processing and distributing of the information.
The digital content produced nowadays is enormous and thereby the role of libraries in providing information has become crucial.
Higher educational institutions generate a quantum of digital academic and scholarly content. The crossover from print to electronic databases in the libraries is playing prominent role to collect, archive, maintain and publish the content. Once the resources increased in the traditional library system the retrieval rate also increased. Then dawn the concept of digitization and digital library. The concept of digital library is defined in many
ways. In general, digital libraries are same as traditional library system, except that the material is represented in the digital format.
Traditional libraries gather, compile, catalogue, preserve, and provide access to the research intellect. Institutional repositories (IR) accomplish the same task with the potential incentive of increased accessibility and collaborative efforts, which are created by building a justifiable program.
Institutional repositories are a fairly modern innovation among top tier academic institutions and major science and technological institutes, providing open access to the research outputs of teaching, non –teaching and research faculty.
An Institutional Repository (IR) is a digital archive where an institution’s intellectual work is made accessible and preserved for posterity. IR will have influence over the full cycle of scholarly communication on campus, from research through publication, collection, and preser vation. Libraries play this important role in shaping institutional digital repositories.
According to Clifford Lynch “institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution. (Lynch, 2003) In the early 1990s the big push started when most of the academic disciplines started contributing their scholarly work through Open Access publishing. Institutional Repositories have been progressively recognized as an important tool for scholarly communication, source of institutional visibility and a possible source of institutional knowledge organisation. Here the major difference between the traditional
and existing institutional repositories is that authors are potentially the major stake holders. Acceptance of the target audience and sufficient funding for the long-term visibility makes the Institutional repository (IR) a success.
Relevance of IR
Institutional Repository is an essential component in any higher education and research institution in the present networked society due to the factors like, technological changes; significant increase in the overall volume of research; increasing need of archival and access to unpublished information; increasing demand to access knowledge objects from anywhere at anytime; and increasing uncertainty over who will handle the preservation and archiving of scholarly research materials.
The importance of the standard IR project are summarized by Kamila (2009) as follows:
It can help to develop a national research repository infrastructure by setting up, populating and linking individual repositories;
It can stimulate development of services that draw on research information made available through the repository infrastructure;
It can provide a window that gives open access to improve the sponsoring institution’s visibility and status;
It can support the open-access model of publication.
Benefits of IR
The benefits of IRs for the scientist/
academician and the research institution are summarized by Kamila (2009) as follows.
Benefits for the Authors
Greater citation: Studies have shown that articles freely available on the Internet are cited more often than their paper counterparts.
Speed: Faculty members can self-publish their preprints immediately, with the possibility of receiving immediate feedback.
Organisation: An institutional repository can contain all of the scholarly work by one faculty member, including material such as preprints, post-prints, presentations, and classroom materials (dependent on copyright restrictions). Instead of being scattered about in different databases, servers, or computer hard drives, this material can be browsed easily in one place by the user, and reused easily by the contributor.
Preservation: In order to ensure continued access, digital files need to be refreshed and migrated. Ten years from now, we will not be able to open a present word file.
Depositing a file into an institutional repository will make repository manager to ensure that such files are updated when technologies change.
Ease of use: Self-submission is possible in institutional repository systems. Library will also support uploading or do all uploading.
All that is needed are files to upload and permission to upload it.
Permanent place: Depositing an item into an institutional repository means that it stays in one place and maintains the same URL.
Benefits for the Institution
The scholarly material produced by the organization is available in one place, reflecting the intellectual achievements of the institution, and ser ving as a valuable marketing tool. Documents reflecting the institutional history, both scholarly and non- scholarly, are preserved for future use, much like a traditional archive preserves paper material. Material that is not traditionally published is included in the repository, including drafts of unpublished articles or book chapters, unpublished research, student works, learning objects, and creative works (Kamila, 2009) .
Institutional Repositories in the IITs Among the higher education system in India, specifically with respect to technical education, Indian Institutes of Technologies (IIT)s are premium institutes that stand the best in India. The ultimate goal of these premium institutes is to produce a core of knowledgeable professionals from multidisciplinary areas. Par to the standards and the excellence which they have, they are lacking behind to share the knowledge which is been generated in these institutes in the form of research articles, research finding which were presented in reports, conference and symposia, pioneering lectures and teaching materials. These materials are means of referring to further research findings and learning. Institutional repositories (IRs) play the role to archive, curate and disseminate the knowledge in open access domain. The intellectual knowledge sharing through the interoperable repositories enhances the academic status and quality of an institution.
Table 1 indicates the availability of IRs in various IITs. Table 2 gives indicates the information sources included in the IRs of various IITs.
Institutional repository of the IIT, Hyderabad
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) initially used to have an IR making its presence only on intranet. The retrospective IR used to archive all the thesis and dissertations of MSc, M.Tech and PhD courses. The genesis of Research Archives of Indian Institute of Technolog y Hyderabad (RAIITH) took place in the year 2014. Eprints was initially installed on a personal computer desktop to test the features by uploading very few records, then could manage to do at most research on the test bed by increasing the addition of records to the database in the form of multiple type of documents (viz., Article, Book chapter, conference proceeding, Thesis, Patent, monograph etc.,) Also this gave a scope to
Table 1: Institutional Repositories in IITs
Sl. No Name Year of Acronym State IR in Software
est., pblic
domain
1 IIKharagpur 1950 IITKGP West Bengal Available Dspace
2 IIT Mumbai 1958 IITB Maharashtra Available Dspace
3 IITMadras 1959 IITM Tamil Nadu Available
4 IIT Kanpur 1959 IITK Uttar Pradesh Intranet
5 IIT New Delhi 1961 IITN Delhi Available Eprints
6 IIT Guwahati 1995 IITG Assam Available Dspace
7 IITRoorkee 2001 IITR Uttarakhand - -
8 IITGandhinagar 2008 IITGN Gujarat Available Dspace
9 IITBhubaneshwar 2008 IITBBS Odisha Available Dspace
10 IITJodhpur 2008 IITJ Rajasthan Available Dspace
11 IIT Hyderabad 2008 IITH Telengana Available Eprints
12 IIT Patna 2008 IITP Bihar Intranet Dspace
13 IIT Ropar 2008 IITRPR Punjab Intranet Dspace
14 IIT Indore 2009 IITI Madhya
Pradesh Intranet Dspace
15 IIT Mandi 2009 IITMandi Himachal Not Not
Pradesh available available 16 IIT(BHU) Varanasi 2012 IIT(BHU) Uttar Pradesh Not yet Not
initiated available 17 IIT(ISM) Dhanbad 2016 IIT(ISM) Jharkhand Not yet Not
initiated available
18 IIT Tirupathi 2016 IITTP Andhra Not yet Not
Pradesh initiated available
19 IIT Palakkad 2016 IITPKD Kerala Not yet Not
initiated available
20 IITDharwad 2016 Karnataka Not yet Not
initiated available
21 IIT Goa 2016 IITGoa Goa Not yet Not
initiated available 22 IIT Bhilai 2016 IITBhilai Chhatisgardh Not yet Not
initiated available
23 IIT Jammu 2016 Jammu Not yet Not
initiated available
add few more plug ins to the existing software for better output. Then the database mirrored on to an individual blade server with sufficient hardware requirements.
Eprints 3.2 was installed on the test bed and then could later update to the versions3.3.12 and 3.3.15
IR Package- Eprints
Integration of data elements in Eprints is quite a good model where the drawings and
text images can be combined and updated.
The integration part of information and updating of the research content at various stages in Eprints at the author drafting stage and publication process is easy. ROAR statistics says that there are 611 institutional repositories (IRs) installed worldwide, using Eprints software of various available versions. In India there are 109 repositories hosted using different open source software.
Almost all the CSIR laboratories setup their
Table2: Information sources in IIT IRs.
Sl. Institute Articles Book Mono- Confe-
No Section graph rence or Book Thesis Patent Teaching
workshop resource other
item
1 IIT Kharagpur Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
2 IIT Mumbai Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
3 IIT Madras Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
4 IIT Kanpur Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
5 IIT N Delhi Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
6 IIT Guwahati Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
7 IIT Roorkee Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
8 IIT Gandhi.nr Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
9 IIT Bhub.ar Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
10 IIT Jodhpur Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
11 IIT Hyderabad Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
in-house IRs using Eprints and DSpace software.
Content Management in RAIITH RAIITH was initially established with 554 records of institute’s research output in the form of thesis (viz. M.Sc., M.Tech, Ph.D.).
The pdf format of these records have been gathered and could successfully add to the newly installed eprints IR from the retrospective in-house repository. Later the content of the IR slowly increased its pace by collecting all the research publication from the major bibliographic database via Scopus.
From the year 2015 onwards IIT Hyderabad
Library team started collecting the research publications from another pioneered bibliographic database, Web of Science (WoS). RAIITH holds preprints, post- prints, open access articles, conference papers, monographs, book chapters, IITH news articles and patents. Most of them cover the major research areas involved at Indian Institute of Technology and a small number of them cover a wider subject base. Figure 1, a screenshot, indicates the document types and figure 2 indicate the divisions included in RAIITH.
Table 3 depicts the resource type and number of the resources in RAIITH.
Figure 1: RAIITH - Document Types
pre/post prints of the research articles, conference papers and other research findings collected from the students/researchers are archived in RAIITH. Presently, RAIITH provides access credentials only to the faculty of IITH enabling them to self-archive their content without the intervention of library staff. Repository admin review the uploads to get the research indexed and harvested by the major harvester like BASE, Google scholar, OAISTER etc
Table 4 depicts the deposits to RAIITH and Table 5 depicts the average of deposits for 4 consecutive years 2014 -2017.
Access
RAIITH allow free access to abstracts without any necessary registration. For the full text article from the repository, a request is to be made by clicking the link ‘Request a copy’
that shall send a mail to the RAIITH admin as-well-as to the first author or the concerned supervisor of the article or thesis. RAIITH follow the embargo period of 3 years for MTech thesis and 5 years for Ph.D. thesis from the date of submission in library. The
Figure 2: RAIITH – Divisions
Table 3: RAIITH – Resource type and Strength
Resource Strength
Article 1717
Thesis 854
Conference 698
Book Section 84
Other 44
Book 7
Patent 11
Monograph 2
3417
Table 4: RAIITH - Deposits
Month Deposits Count 2014 2015 2016 2017
Jan 46 77 71
Feb 28 55 41
M a r 73 37 60
Apr 45 40 59
May 67 123 0
Jun 66 81 142
Jul 134 69 130
Aug 149 116 62
Sep 119 64 85 79
Oct 247 38 64 45
Nov 465 46 57 35
Dec 222 41 39 0
TOTAL 1053 797 843 724
Table 5: Average of Deposits in RAIITH
Month Deposits Average 2014 2015 2016 2017
Jan 219 113 95
Feb 187 110 93
M a r 171 106 92
Apr 155 102 91
May 145 103 88
Jun 137 102 90
Jul 137 101 91
Aug 138 101 90
Sep 119 132 101 90
Oct 183 125 99 89
Nov 277 120 98 87
Dec 263 115 96 0
TOTAL 842 1781 1232 996 4851
Copy right, Altmetrics
Content of RAIITH is based on Sherpa/
RoMEO for archival of information.
Altmetrics, the new metrics for analysing and informing scholarship based on the social web, focus on web influence and refers to a range of measures of research impact that go beyond citations. It measure the number of times a research output gets cited, tweeted, liked, shared, viewed or discussed. It harvests open access journals, citation databases which index scholarly articles, web- based research sharing services, and social media. One such analysis on RAIITH is given as Fig 3 and 4 .
Usage Statistics
Currently RAIITH holds 3,418 records having 30,538 download with 47% (1606 documents) full text and 22% (752
Figure 3: RAIITH and Altmetric I
Figure 4: RAIITH and Altmetrics II
Table 6: RAIITH – Downloads Count
Month Count
2014 2015 2016 2017
Jan 58 238 693
Feb 14 250 1054
M a r 66 324 2050
Apr 46 301 1285
May 110 1339
Jun 134 3365 740
Jul 399 722 1476
Aug 309 1392 2063
Sep 121 652 1903
Oct 33 270 920 2100
Nov 58 269 760 2256
Dec 86 364 1724
Total 177 2160 12658 15620
Grand Total 30615
Table 7: RAIITH – Average Downloads
Month Count
2014 2015 2016 2017
Jan 58 238 693
Jan 58 160 560
Feb 49 166 577
M a r 52 174 626
Apr 51 181 647
May 58 239 627
Jun 67 388 630
Jul 100 403 655
Aug 119 446 695
Sep 119 455 729
Oct 33 131 473 766
Nov 45 155 484 805
Dec 59 160 530
Total 137 1119 4124 7317
Grand Total 12697
documents) open access. The repository became popular and could reach to the maximum globally, the IR registered its presence with most popular harvesting search engines like BASE, Google scholar and OAISTER. Table 6 gives download count and Table 7 gives average downloads of RAIITH.
Search Interface
The repository is searchable by a Basic search interface and also an advanced search. For a quick reach, the users can easily get connected to the repository by browsing by author, year, subject and type of information. The recently added content to the repository can be viewed under Latest Additions.
Conclusion
Building open scholarly repositories, institutional repositories, digital libraries, etc are necessary for the visibility of research carried out by an institution. IRs enhance the idea of rebuilding trust between the library and the users. IRs make the libraries to feel that it act as a vehicle to carry forward research with visibility and openness of the
work, offering more citations. IRs also act as a platform for collaborative research among internationally distributed IRs.
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